Wednesday, May 06, 2015

My vote is
very nearly worthless. So is yours. And that’s a good thing.

The idea
that a single person is likely to ‘make a difference’ in an election would be a
seductive myth if it weren’t so obviously false, because the whole point of
democracy is that one person doesn’t make much difference. If you want power in
one person’s hands, you want a dictatorship.

voting in a General Election is not a powerful act.
When I go to put an X on the ballot paper, it is not with a feeling of
political influence coursing through my fingers and that stubby little pencil,
it is more with a feeling like the one you get when you look at the picture
made famous by Carl Sagan – the pale blue dot that is Earth, suspended in a sunbeam somewhere in the
universe. It’s famously humbling, but also rather thrilling, in a way, to be so
insignificant!

I think
there is beauty in this. There’s something wonderful about the fact that on one
day, all the power of the state is smashed into millions of tiny pieces and given
back to its rightful owners. We each then take our own tiny piece of power and
put them together in the way we think best.

The result
can be disappointing – an awkward structure, designed by millions of people
with different priorities and different ideas. And once it’s built, chances are
that it’ll function in a way that no individual would have ideally wanted.

But
democracy has to be about more than elections. The way to make an election as
disappointing as possible is to treat it as an isolated act of individual
choice.

democracy isn't a restaurant where every diner gets to
order a la carte. It's a family where there's a row about what's for dinner,
then one meal gets cooked for everyone: no one gets exactly what they want and
everyone is a bit unhappy but eats it anyway.

A vote may
be individual but an election is collective. The better the conversation we
have before the decision, the better that decision will be. As Michael says:

to actually wield real democratic power,
you must do more than cast a vote each time you are asked: you have to be
active, engage with other voters, listen and argue with them, and perhaps
compromise a little.

The
decision is collective. We’re not just making it each for ourselves; we’re
making it for each other.

Tomorrow I’ll
do my bit, my tiny little bit. It won’t mean much from a national point of view,
but it’ll mean a lot to me to be part of something big.